Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 35 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

EVENTS

An Excellent Response to Stupidity

I just love this excellent letter written by Pakistani journalist Kunwar Khuldune Shahid. Such a wonderful response to those ‘educated’ women who are proud of being veiled Muslims and who foolishly defend Islam, the anti-women religion. The author of this letter is a man. I am proud of men like Kunwar Khuldune, who believe in women’s rights.

Dear Muslimaat,
I don’t have words to express my gratitude and appreciation for your noble battle against evil. Your #MuslimahPride movement against #Femen was a slap on the collective face of Western imperialists who believe that Muslim women can’t fight for a cause. It was also a resounding reminder for the rest of the world that you have what it takes to spark a revolution. What the ignorant world does not realise is that once you have the permission of your husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, the approval of your neighbours, in-laws, their relatives and the consent of your spiritual guardians, their God and their scriptures, you can be quite the rebels.

It takes a lot of courage to ridicule something that is already taboo where you live. It takes volumes of bravery and valour to bow down to the status quo, and toe the lines that have been forced upon you. It takes unbelievable amounts of gallantry to act out a script that someone else has written for you. And it must take guts and the proverbial cojones to take a stand against cruelty and the personification of tyranny that a horde of topless women is.

Who on earth are those damn Europeans to try to steal your voice? Do they not realise that your lives were defined a million-and-a-half ago by the Arabs, who protected your rights and guarded your modesty by ensuring that you don’t have much of a say in most things? Who are those unabashed infidels to protest on your behalf? Do they not realise that you are not allowed to express, let alone clamour in favour of, anything that contradicts the ostensibly divine scriptures? Who are those shameless activists to try and liberate you? Do they not realise that you can’t be liberated without the permission of your mehrams?

I can’t thank you enough for choosing to be more offended by naked bodies than dead bodies. And since there are so many different kinds of you to thank, I’ll try to address you one by one.

Dear ‘guardians of modesty’ Muslimaat, thank you for letting patriarchal societies define ‘modesty’ for you. Thank you for accepting contrasting definitions of modesty for men and women, and for not being a source of strength for your sisters and daughters, vindicating the men’s claim of you being the weaker sex. Thank you for teaching your daughters about the sin that having sex is, throughout their lives, and then compelling them to do it immediately with a man they first met a couple of hours ago, after signing a few papers and getting the clergy’s approval. Also, thank you for blaming your fellow women when they are raped, since men have the divine license to refuse to keep their emotions in the right place. And thank you very very much for being more misogynistic than any male chauvinist can ever possibly be.

Dear ‘feminist’ Muslimaat, thank you for being a ray of hope for bacon-eating vegetarians, god-fearing atheists and peace-loving terrorists. Thank you for reiterating the fact that your mehrams choose to overlook the divine orders and allow you to think freely and take your own decisions. Thank you for citing your personal example to highlight how you wear the hijab by your own choice, ignoring the fact that an overwhelming majority of Muslim women are coerced into doing so. Thank you very much for making the whole debate about you, when it was always about the torment and suffering that most of the Muslim women are going through.

Dear ‘liberal’ Muslimaat, thank you for defying the orders of your deity by choosing to not cover your heads. Thank you for disregarding other restrictions that your religion commands, and then having the audacity to condemn someone who is critical of these very commands. Thank you for cherry picking the commandments and making your ideology sound compatible with the 21st century, only to castigate those that take the same ideological orders literally and implement them. Thanks a lot for elucidating that you don’t need liberation and for paying no heed to the fact that the most of the women in your country do. And thank you very much for clinging on to those very shackles that have enchained the prospect of women empowerment in your country.

Dear ‘revolutionary’ Muslimaat, thank you for ignoring the life threats that Amina Tyler and many others like her are facing, after choosing to protest against the harassment that they have to bear on a daily basis. Thank you for overlooking other lesser issues like terrorists attacking a 15-year-old schoolgirl; female genital mutilation; women being raped with judicial approval just so they don’t die virgins; two-year-old girls being forced to wear veils because the disgusting men in your country have no self-control; and fathers legally getting away with raping their daughters by paying a few riyals. Thank you very much for screaming bloody murder over half-naked women’s claim of representing you, but accepting rapists, pedophiles and sorry excuses for human beings as your state leaders and role models.

#MuslimahPride is not just a hashtag, it’s a symbol of integrity and pride. It’s about taking pride in inequality, in half testimonies, in blaming rape victims and in gender discrimination. It’s about taking pride in chauvinism, where men have divine permission to beat and rape their wives, marry multiple times and possess slave girls. It’s about taking pride in patriarchal societies where husbands are categorically told in detail how they should punish their “disobedient” wives, while not a single text exclusively tells women what they should do with unfaithful husbands. It’s about taking pride in not being allowed to vote, let alone lead your nations, and about finally being allowed to ride a goddamn bicycle – under a mehram’s supervision – in the year 2013 AD.

The #MuslimahPride jihad will be written down in history as the moment where Muslimaat made it clear to the world that no one should protest on their behalf, half-naked or otherwise. Thank you, dear Muslimaat, for saving the rest of the world’s time by clarifying that you’re fine living in the 7th century AD, and no one should push you towards the enlightened times, regardless of whether they have clothes on or not. Thank you for being a source of inspiration and an illuminating example for everyone. We all know that you have what it takes to transform the plight of the women and change the dynamics of the world, as long as you are back home before sunset.

More power to you.

PS: I hope being addressed as ‘dear’ does not land you in trouble with your oversensitive male guardians.

Comments

Truth hurts. Patriarchy, like all oppressive sub-systems would disintegrate if it weren’t for the phenomenon of internal colonization of majority of the females and males. During slavery and colonization, many enslaved became the staunchest supporters of the system. Rather like the Stockholm syndrome where the kidnapped identify with the kidnappers. In your curt reaction, chigau (meh) you are derailing all discussion by transfering the viciousness of patriarchal religions on to the author of this thoughtful essay. I loved his use of irony.

The issue is this: certain Muslim “women elites” who “supposedly do not suffer from discrimination”, since they have either rich husbands, or sugar daddies; or they are privileged enough to have a decent “modern education” that earns them a decent living, think that this is the norm for the rest of the majority of women living under Muslim culture. This is precisely the “reverse essentializing” that we need to be very wary of.

The contemporary debates surrounding the civilizational contestations being waged between “Western culture” and Islamism, is a debate that is centred around the perceptions, and daily experiences of elites. It is high time that the “voiceless/silent” majority of Muslims, both male and female, make themselves heard, or else they risk remaining marginalized for many more generations.

Life for women in those dark backward nations is even more terrible than life for men; it’s not like men are winning. Everyone loses with conflict but sometimes the tone of feminist writing suggests the writer imagines that men are living large raping their daughters and getting away with it for a few riyal (wouldn’t we all if we could get away with it so cheaply!); failing to control the human(?) desire to rape two-year-olds (in the West, we’re not disgusting; we have Self-control and don’t let our urges to rape toddlers get the better of us); beating their wives with the miserable emotional corruption that degraded their early childhood (men have all the fun!); or mutilating female gentials (I’ll have to remember to add that one to my Bucket List). What I’m trying to say is life is hellish for everyone in Hell.

Can you have winners of apartheid? Does the gender with the upper hand win in war between the sexes? Are you blessed if you’ve been Chosen to exclude 99.8% of your human options for happiness?

Mothers need to fix all this combative insanity. Men are broken and in any case, they don’t have the power to effect genuine change. Only mothers can dictate emotional values.

Polyglot: Truth hurts. Patriarchy, like all oppressive sub-systems would disintegrate if it weren’t for the phenomenon of internal colonization of majority of the females and males. During slavery and colonization, many enslaved became the staunchest supporters of the system. Rather like the Stockholm syndrome where the kidnapped identify with the kidnappers.

It’s exactly like Stockholm Syndrome. The introduction children receive to this world is effectively capture-bonding. Coincidentally, used to great effect on abducted African humans made to be slaves. It’d be fascinating to know how many children plantation mothers had, on average.

Everything important is setup during early childhood emotional development and children get an emotional education that largely consists of violence and deceit from mothers who Know Best how to make children suffer to please; they’ve been practising on men for a decade. Future mothers are practising on me every day; they don’t want to appear to be easy. Their future children will wish themselves unborn (before they bow to tyranny and adopt the tyrant’s value system). Children are raised Right to respect their elders.

Because the elders are old? No.

Because the elders communicate their will to children with psychotic violence. It’s the only way they’ve been taught how to communicate their will; by using power, force, violence, bullying to persuade. In their mother tongue.

‘Dear’ Tarek.What a mysoginic view.If you think your stupid observations can ‘liberate’ a few supposedly suppressed Muslima’at, more power to your ilk. Have you ever thought that a lady likes to be covered up. Away from lascivious eyes and maintain her dignity?